What Microsoft Can Learn About Retail from Apple and Best Buy

Now that Microsoft has decided to open up its own retail stores, they need some help from all of us in building a great retail experience. Remember, this isn't Microsoft's first time. Microsoft used to have a store at San Francisco's Metreon but that was a good example of what to do wrong. Here's some things they did wrong on that effort:

1. They picked a crappy location with very little foot traffic. Apple, on the other hand, has a huge store near the Metreon that gets easily 200x the foot traffic that went by Microsoft's old store (which was inside the Metreon, so didn't have a street presence, and worse of all, was upstairs).

2. It just had a lot of boxes and products. It didn't use aspirational techniques. Apple, when you walk in, has signage that tells you that if you had a Mac you could do better podcasts or better photos or better videos. That's aspirational. It helps people aspire to do something better. Microsoft needs to tap into that big time and is getting close when it does ads like this one with a four-year-old girl.

3. Microsoft, in its first effort, didn't pay attention to deep aesthetics. Everything in an Apple store has been thought out. Everytime I go there I notice the desks which have huge slabs of wood that FEEL good to touch. Other retail stores don't pay attention to this stuff. Next time you're in an Apple store look at the tiles they use for flooring (here's my photo of the NY Apple store). Now compare to what you find at, say, Best Buy.

4. Microsoft didn't make it comfortable (or useful) for people to visit. Apple has free wifi and never complains when I sit on a machine for hours playing around.

5. Microsoft didn't make the experience magical. Nordstroms, for instance, has a piano playing in the middle and I can get a latte and then go shoe shopping. They've worked on adding something extra to the process of buying shoes. The old Microsoft store didn't have that extra element.

So, what about today? What can we learn about Best Buy and Apple and use that to give Microsoft some good advice?

I visit Best Buy stores often and I gotta admit that experience leaves me wanting. Here's why:

1. When I worked retail (I helped run a high volume discount consumer electronics store in Silicon Valley in the 1980s) I learned that your sales go up when you take customers through a sales process. One that's consultative. That doesn't give too many choices. And one that asks lots of questions. I'd start out by learning what they were looking for "I'm looking to buy a camera." Then I'd start firing the questions, things like "big and pro or small and easy to carry around?" If they said small, I'd ask "are you looking for the best, or are you looking to fit into a certain budget?" I'd keep asking questions until there was only one obvious choice left. Now, visit a BestBuy store. I have. Too many choices. The signage doesn't take you through that sales process very well. If I were Microsoft I'd think hard about that sales process and I'd think about how to get people to see one obvious choice. Microsoft has its work cut out here, though. It offers too many versions of its Windows operating system, for instance. That introduces confusion, especially when compared to Apple, which only has one (I just bought an upgrade for one of my Macs and the whole sales process took literally 30 seconds, where at Microsoft I'd have to decide between a bunch of different versions like "home" or "ultimate." I learned early on that if people have too many things to choose from they get confused and leave the store without buying.

Look at Best Buy's HDTV display, photo above, now tell me what the sales process is. I couldn't find one at all. Nothing about "this is the screen for football fanatics" or "this is the screen if you want to have a great picture for a low price." Nothing at all. Gotta talk to a salesperson, which now is hard to find.

2. Microsoft has to build an integral and magical experience. When you go to Disneyland everything fits together and attention was paid to every element of a guest's experience. Same thing here. If I were Microsoft's designers I'd start with the bathrooms. Why? That's one place that Apple hasn't spent much time (they often are dirty, don't use any technology, and don't match the rest of the store in the experience). Make the bathroom experience magical, then work backward out into the store. Make every experience something you can't do at any other store.

3. Decide whether you're going to have an employee-heavy approach or not and stick to it. Inside an Apple store there's usually an employee for every three people inside the store. That's pretty heavy because at most of its stores you'll find 50 to 200 customers in the store at the same time. Compare that to, say, Walmart or IKEA, which might only have one employee for 100 customers. Both approaches are great, but will totally affect all your signage and decisions for how you'll setup the store. Don't be confused about this and stick to it. Personally, since technology is something that's confusing where buying a jar of pickles at Walmart or Costco isn't, I would recommend going with an employee-heavy approach. You need to think out every interaction a customer is going to need and want and have an employee there to take care of those needs. Best Buy is an example of getting it wrong. There aren't enough employees around when I visit their stores, especially given the lack of information on many of its product displays, the confusing array of products, and the lack of a sales process that it pushes them to a purchase decision. Microsoft can't make that mistake.

4. Assume that everyone who walks in the store is online and make sure the online and offline experience are totally joined. Apple gets this pretty close to perfect. The sales help even use the online site to order me product that'll be shipped to my house, and use it to show me choices that are out there. They don't shy away from it. Microsoft should go further and use its tag system so that I can aim my cell phone at a product display card and get more information, including where I can get the best price on that item online. I learned that when I told my customers everyone else's prices (they went and checked out if I was accurate or not) that they often came back and bought from me because I was authoritative on the marketplace. Microsoft needs to do the same thing: assume everyone will check out everything you say online. I would build an aggregation of all stores online — show what people said about each product on, say, Amazon. Show what it's selling for on eBay. Demonstrate that you can beat BH Photo's pricing.

Look above at how ugly Best Buy's product displays are. They also don't tell you what's really important in a human way. Why don't they have the store manager put a little quote on each product? Something like "this camera is the best one to both fit in your pocket and make YouTube videos?" They totally miss that this is the greatest video camera invented in the past five years because it is the easiest way to make YouTube videos.

5. Have better service than anyone in the business. At Fry's it's often hard to find someone who speaks English or understands the products well. You have got to be better than that. That means paying people more than minimum wage so that they stick around and show some loyalty to working for you. Then train, train, train, train them on everything. At my store I met almost every morning with factory reps to learn the products and hear from them what made them special. I did tons of research, going out and using the products, including taking home expensive speaker systems and camera gear. That translated into much better product knowledge than my competitors had. Microsoft needs to do that. But it also needs to build a world-class service desk. Apple calls that their "genius bar" and they have always been very good with me. Just two weeks ago they tore into a Mac that was giving me troubles and found a RAM chip that was going bad. Replaced it no charge and got my Mac running again. I've seen this happen with my son, too. His iPhone battery was going dead in an hour. They handed him a new one and didn't ask to see his parents. Magical service brings you customers.

6. Use the signage outside the store to do something. Apple does this. Walk by a store and you'll see a URL in the window, along with a professionally-done display that changes with each new season or product that comes out. Now compare that to BestBuy. The front of this BestBuy store is seen by hundreds of thousands of people every day driving down Silicon Valley's 101 freeway. Why doesn't it have a sign on it that includes a URL? A call to action "come in and check out the new big screens." It's wasted space. When I hung a new sign in my store's window sales went up 30%. This stuff is important.

7. Copy Apple and get rid of checkout lines. I hate standing in line at BestBuy. In fact I've walked out more than once leaving my purchase right there. That's lame. Apple's employees walk around with little computers in their hands. They ring you up right there without making you stand in line. They email me my receipt. Forcing paper on customers is totally lame, especially in this time where we're supposed to be conserving paper.

8. Focus on the lifestyle, not the products. That will turn customers into long-term brand evangelists rather than people who just "buy Windows" or "get an Xbox." Microsoft's strength is in its range of products, so focus on that and get rid of the "move boxes" mentality. Of course, Microsoft better nail this because Apple is already thinking along these lines in a redesign of its stores. My photo of a sign inside an Apple store a couple of years ago shows that it is the computer for the blogging and podcasting lifestyle (this was before most people knew what those were).

9. Figure out a way to get people to see the possibilities of new online services. Symantec, for instance, is moving toward online services and away from selling retail boxes. Apple figured this out with its iPhone application store. Apple is rubbing that in at the retail level too. The store I just visited two days ago had a huge display in its front window about all the cool apps you could get on your iPhone.

10. Find a way to not look like Microsoft. Microsoft is a huge, global company. Try to make the store feel like a small-town technology store with a friendly proprietor who was looking out for you because he wanted you to come back. I'm not sure how I'd do that, but it would be one of my core philosophies as I designed every element: try NOT to look big, but instead play up the small. Oh, an example is Applebees restaurants. The one I go to in San Jose has pictures of the local high school and college coaches and sports teams hanging in it. That's an example of designing for the local market and keeping a "small town" feel.

11. Visit the computer marts in Shenzhen, China and Tokyo, Japan. Take away what makes them interesting (wide variety of choices) but get rid of what makes them a nasty experience (the clutter, dirt, lack of sales process, and too much hustle). I love that I can go to one of these stores, or the Fry's locally, and get components to build my own hardware prototype.

12. Make your customers and employees smarter. At Apple's San Francisco store they have a theater where an employee or someone from the community is constantly giving talks on something. Learn to edit videos. Learn to make better photos. Learn to design a blog. Etc. Etc. Apple works at making its customers smarter. That turns into evangelistic behavior later when those customers show their friends their cool photos, blogs, Facebook pages, etc.

13. Again, focus on EVERY aesthetic. Compare how Apple hooks cameras to its tables vs. how Best Buy does it. Which one makes you feel better? Which one has a magical experience? Apple is KILLING Best Buy in this area. Look at the photo above, now compare to Apple's stores' displays.

Well, I've rambled on enough. What about you? What would you do to make going into a Microsoft store a magical experience?